The National Lyric Theater of Cuba presented this weekend an opera by Richard Wagner: The Flying Dutchman. It would not be great news if it were not the first staging of a work of this giant on the island. Seldom someone has sung or played scores of Wagner in Cuba; it was a cherished dream. Accustomed as we are to the Italian and French sounds, it came in very handy this powerful foray into the German school. But Wagner, everybody knows that, is a very complex subject, especially for those who have no tradition of assuming him. The Symphony Orchestra of the Gran Teatro de La Habana, under the baton of the young company's director Eduardo Diaz, strove to interpret the music. Not that they were wrong, but one expects a much stronger symphonic body. In this section, they did what they could, but the chorus itself should have worked a little more, sometimes it did not look comfortable, as passages were too much for them. Fortunately the characters were more convincing, especially the Ukrainian baritone Andrei Maslakov , who has lots of experience in these conflicts . His confidence was well supported by Johana Simon and Yuri Hernandez, Cuban...

To Alicia, 60 years from her debut in Giselle I had a physics teacher during school –definitely mannered, extremely nice an capable; one of the best teachers I have had– who loved ballet, concert music and theatre with all his heart. This might sound sentimental but he used to say it so convincingly that I –an innocent, restless and curious boy, eager to see the world– felt touched. His name was Humberto Calvo, I hope he is still alive (it has been almost 20 years since I last saw him and he wasn’t young by then). He lived in Moron and he used to complain about not being able to listen to his favorite radio station CMBF National Musical Radio because of an antenna near his house. It was actually shocking the fact that, with all that humanistic culture, he taught such an exact science. He used to laugh: “Physics is everything; it is in every principle, even in arts. Music is somehow physics; dance is very physical, even something so impalpable like poetry can be born out of a merely physical impulse”. I didn’t understand it at first, but then I thought it was because I hated it, I...

In Violeta the land is red, intense, sticky red.Those who know say it is good land, fertile. Violeta  lives its peaceful evolution marked by its sugar mill and its land. When I was at Vocational Pre-University Institute of Exact Sciences, people made fun of Violeta: "You live in the most desolate place in Earth; there are only  mud and red land." Atfirst it bothered me a lot, because those who said that were the boys of Ciego de Ávila and Morón, who were born  in ¨cities¨, they believed they were inhabitants of large cities. Nonsense! Ciego and Moron are in any case large villages and they are still too close to agricultural land. I faced them: "Thanks to that mud you eat vegetables from time to time. Violeta is one of the granaries of the country. “Those were difficult years, the hardest years of the special period. I did not was very hungry because my grandparents had a farm and Dad worked in a cooperative as economic. But people in cities had really bad times: there was very little food. The argument that I lived in a predominantly agricultural municipality should silence those who mocked, but it did not. From...

A friend of social networks told me (via chat) that life of each man can be an exciting novel. "In fact, he added, the story of each of us is a potential bestseller. Each one has the germ of the great universal story; that made me think. I have said again and again that there are millions of good stories that remain untold (the air is full of memories / which will not be narrated ever-I recently wrote in a poem). The thing is in finding the chronicler. I answered my friend: everyone can be a best-seller, but not everyone can write it down. " Overwhelming answer" he replie d, and we kept talking about other things. But, by these days I have returned again and again to the subject and have come to the conclusion that the story of my family, particularly my father's family story, deserves a book. Maybe there are much more interesting stories, but I assure you that the one of my father does not lack of crowd puller and adventures. You may judge by yourselves: my grandmother was only fourteen when she got pregnant, it was a scandal considering she was a girl of respectable...

The bus stopped at the road from Guantanamo to Santiago de Cuba. A malfunction had to be fixed and it was going to take a while. I got bored of being sat and thought of getting off. I had seen a man sitting on the edge of the road. I took a picture on him and I was watching it now. I decided to get off. It was almost midmorning. The scenery was beautiful, although traces of Hurricane Sandy could still be noticed: there were palms and other trees with their top off and houses without roofs. But the landscape was still beautiful. I walked around the bus, stretched my legs. Finally I approached the seated man. He was talking to someone near him, an old man, who according to the depth of his wrinkles should be about ninety years. -          What are you doing? The old man asked. -          - Waiting' the seated man replied. - Who are you waiting for? The old man asked again. - 'No one, I’m not expecting anyone. I just sat here to wait. The bus driver told that everything was arranged, that we were going to continue traveling. I got on the bus,...

Occasionally, on my blog or in some other lost chronic, I have talked about ¨La Gallega ¨, the neighbor of my grandmother. The truth is that I forgot her name long ago, if I ever knew it. Everyone called her "La Gallega", I’m not sure why, because she was born in the middle of the Sierra Maestra (Mountain Range). At the beginning of 1990s, she emigrated to Ciego de Avila, like so many of her fellow citizens. "Things were not good in the Eastern Cuban. She told my grandmother that her family consisted in 14 members who lived in a house that was smaller than hers. Then she told her sister: I'm going to seek fortunes in Camagüey, there is work there. ¨I sent my children first and look at me; I'm here, I’m your neighbor. "La Gallega was a very strong old woman; she was always spirited, helpful and talkative. She had a very unique vision of manners: she asked permission for everything and apologized each time she asked permission. It was something like this: "Luisita, may I come to your house and I’m sorry for asking." That provoked very fun to my grandmother. One day I found out...

I know a few who miss Alfredito Rodriguez with all the strength of their hearts. Like it or not, Alfredito was an extremely popular singer. He had as many admirers as detractors. When he left Cuba many suffered it and others were glad. "Fortunately we will never see him again on TV," a friend said. "So good his programs were!!!", a neighbor said. To me, frankly, I did not care. But since I got the famous digital TV box I have access to the new music channel, Clave. And it's been twice that I tuned it and I find Alfredito in the concert presentation of his album I'm the forbidden. Considering that he never again appeared on national channels, two things may be happening: that those responsible for Clave are rendered admirers of the singer (able to challenge "censorship"), or soon they will raise the tacit prohibition and Alfredito to sing again for Cubans, for all channels in all stations. To my friend will be a punishment. For my neighbor, a happy reunion. And I will continue to do the same.

Maybe my friend Yindra does not remember this. Or maybe this did not happen with Yindra and it is me who has a bad memory. The fact is that one day, in the late nineties, we were walking down La Rampa, and talking about common things usually spoken by journalism students in their early years (nonsense with pretensions of significance, delicious nonsense) and we ended up talking about one of our favorite topics by those days: how will we deal with fame when we were famous journalists, great public figures? When you ask a journalism student why he chose that degree course, it is more likely him to make you a heated argument about community service and responsibility to report... Something like that we told our teacher Rolando Almirante when he asked the question in his class. Almirante sneered at us: " Do not deceive yourself nor wanting to fool me, most of you chose this profession because you want to be recognized." That’s what Yindra and I were talking about; at twenty you believe that the world will be the stage for success. We arrived at O Street and had to dodge a crowd. A hefty blond man got...

My dad used to say that I lived making up stories. "This kid has a lot of imagination," he told his friends. "H e creates stories at once." Let's face it, I told many lies as a child. I mean, I was not a liar, I was a dreamer. My brother went to play with neighborhood children in the park in front of the building and I was left in the apartment, reading or watching cartoons. When my brother returned, extremely dirty, he told me: "You must be bored up here alone ." And there I began: "Absolutely not, while you were playing downstairs, a lady with a feathered hat knocked on the door. She was neither young nor old, and it was difficult to know because she wore a face veil. She asked if I was alone and I said yes. She told me she was looking for a child that was lost one day and I answered he was not here. In the end I was a little scared, but she asked me not to be worried that she believed in me. And she gave me a good red apple when she was leaving " . My brother...

I spoke the other day of Cunagua and a reader wrote to me: "I would like to know more about the batey (town built around a sugar mill). In the early sixties I did a harvest there. It was a lovely little town. Is it still cute? I never returned ... "Yes, dear friend, the batey is still cute. It is, in fact, one of the most unique architectural complexes of the island. Due to its values it was declared a National Monument a few years ago, a condition that not many other places in the province of Ciego de Avila have. The batey is preserved. Some of the typical American-inspired chalets (parquet and tiles) are in good condition. In others you can see the ravages of time and neglect. A few of them are in ruins. And some are not longer there; instead they have built ugly and sloppy masonry houses. But you can still "breathe" the spirit of the town. Yes, there is a problem, my friend, something that probably does not fit your memory: the mill doesn’t work anymore; it's just a mass of rusted iron with a useless chimney.... You do not hear the factory whistle...

I do not even want to remember it, the memory is quite painful: at half past five they sued to drag the pigs out of the barnyard, throw them around the yard in the middle of their bawling, then immobilized them outside the house and there, killed them with a sharp knife. The scream was so heartbreaking that I sometimes could not repress a tear. I was a kid too sensitive, no way to get around it, because my brother, two years younger than me, when he just heard the rattle of the door of the pen, jumped out of bed and went to see how they killed the pig . More than once he even asked to be allowed to stab it, what happens is that my grandfather was a wise man, and used to tell him "when you grow up maybe, let that to men". Meanwhile, I covered my ears, trying not to hear anything. The worst was when the butcher was not well versed: sometimes the pig was slow to die and the panting of his rattle was worse than the screams. Once or twice a year, in my grandparents' house, they killed two pigs, to distribute...

A picture like that's nearly impossible to get in Havana. Everyone here cares for his bike as if it were worth their weight in gold. But in the countryside life is more sedated, and there are still people who leave their belongings at everybody’s reach, with the confidence that no one will come to steal them. This photo was taken on Cunagua, a sugar mill town(a town that lost is mill) in the central province of Ciego de Avila. What you see is not a yard; next to this wall you find the street already. Everyone goes through there, but there was no one watching the bike, in fact, the door was locked. How strange that placidity of small towns! Although, when I come to think of it, that calmness is been lost even in the small towns. Well near Cunagua, in Violeta, my hometown, no one would think at this point to let alone a bike in sight of all. Thieves have stolen about three bikes from my cousin, almost in front of herface. Times have changed, I will not get tired of repeating it (is sympathetic, because times have been changed since the beginning of time, but some...

Here in this same sea, under this same sun, Ernest Hemingway used to fish decades ago. Everybody knows that the wildly popular writer from the United States was also a man who enjoyed intense adventures. Fishing for different types of marlin, or billfish, was one of his passions during the years that he lived in Cuba. That love inspired his beloved novella The Old Man and the Sea, and it also helped bring about one of the oldest and most reputable international fishing tournaments, which bears his name. The tournament’s 63rd edition is set to begin on May 20 at Havana’s Marina Hemingway, and fishing enthusiasts from different countries (in teams of up to four) will have the opportunity of accumulating points for the IGFA Offshore World Championship. Some things have changed since the years when Hemingway participated in and sponsored the tournament. The billfish population has shrunk considerably, making it necessary to help preserve these species. Therefore, the Havana tournament uses the “tag and release” method (placing a tag on and then releasing the prey), with the corresponding digital photos that accredit the procedure. In this year’s tournament, participants will begin using biodegradable circular hooks, which are less harmful...